1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of acquiring and transmitting information relating to the deceased and administering a depository to achieve this.
2. Statement of the Problem
Those concerned with responding to the deaths of others have traditionally been obliged to attend to the obituary pages of newspapers. As deaths occur, persons responsible for publicizing these deaths select certain newspapers and provide them with material for death notices, or obituaries. The newspapers then publish the notices in their obituary sections where readers peruse them to learn whether any death has occurred to which they wish to respond. This conventional method of disseminating death notices has many disadvantages.
Monitoring the obituary pages of a newspaper is a time consuming, tedious and sometimes depressing task. Moreover, it is usually fruitless since most such readings announce no death that concerns the reader. Readers know this, yet remain obliged to consult these pages because they realize that they always might announce a death that is important to them. Failure to acknowledge some deaths can have unwanted consequences not only socially but in the world of business and politics. For the elderly, responding to the deaths of others is often a major concern requiring constant attention to the obituary pages of newspapers.
The conventional method of disseminating obituaries also involves uncertainty. If a reader neglects the obituary pages for even a few days they may during that time announce a death that nullifies months of diligent reading. Even if during the period of neglect they announce no death that concerns the reader, the reader who lapses and resumes does not know this and wonders whether a death anticipated has already occurred. If a person wishes to travel when an important death is in the offing the conventional system creates insuperable problems because it is usually impossible for travelers to obtain their regular newspapers.
Further, an important death may be overlooked simply through inadvertence especially by the elderly, those living alone and those intensively engaged in demanding projects. I have suffered social embarrassment through failure to learn of the deaths of others and at one point was reduced to making precarious arrangements with a friend to inform them of a certain death if he learned of it. The conventional system of disseminating death notices provided no way in which one could assure him or herself of timely notice of a given death.
The conventional system also presents needless difficulty to those responsible for disseminating news of a death, especially when the deceased had many friends. After personally notifying a small circle of friends and relatives they must decide which newspapers all others are most likely to read, place notices in them and trust that those who read different newspapers, or who seldom read the obituary pages, will learn of the death some other way. Often the family of the deceased realizes that the one or more newspapers selected are unlikely to convey news of the death to certain interested parties, yet they remain averse to a direct personal notification of some of these parties. This problem has persisted despite the diligent introduction of new services by funeral homes because it stems from a cause deeper than the disinclination to perform demanding social chores during a time of distress.
The source of the problem lies in the psychosocial dynamics beneath the direct personal notification. A direct personal notification implies an expectation that the one thus notified will want to attend the memorial services. If that person will not attend, an unprepared and awkward explanation is apt to be necessary and any lack of tact in giving or receiving it will tend to create the aura of a failed test of friendship. Such an outcome is more than a discomfort for the party notified. It is also a disadvantage for the family because when an acquaintance believes that he or she has offended the family and lost its regard this tends to impair even such relationship as there was. The problem is exacerbated to the degree that the family does not know what the exact nature of the friend's relationship with the deceased really was and hence does not know even how to expect that person to respond. Accordingly, family members frequently accept it as regrettable but inevitable that despite their best use of the conventional system certain friends and acquaintances of the deceased will probably not receive timely news of the death they wish to publicize.
Finally, the dying themselves sometimes worry that distant friends will fail to learn of their death because they can not be sure that their survivors will manage or even undertake to inform all of them.